Photographer Chris Jordan Depicts Shark Finning With 270,000 Teeth

Just how big of a problem is shark finning? Experts estimate we kill over 73 million sharks a year, many of which are caught for their fins. But how do we visualize that scale of a catch? Artist Chris Jordan is a specialist in this area, and created an image to help us wrap our heads around the numbers.

The piece "depicts 270,000 fossilized shark teeth, equal to the estimated number of sharks of all species killed around the world every day for their fins."

A tooth for a shark....

And at 270,000 a day, that's a lot of teeth, and a lot of loss for our oceans. You can zoom in and out of Jordan's "Shark Teeth" image on the website, and it helps to grasp the sheer enormity of the problem. As you hone in on just a few teeth, and then zoom out to see them lost in the image, you start to understand just how much we're draining our oceans of important predators every day.